yeah the social commentary and underlying themes were great but what really made me love NOPE was the chaotic lesbian, her quietly hilarious brother, the scrunkly little customer service worker they adopted, and the eldritch horror that followed them home like a stray cat

what’s a bad miracle?

OJ treating Angel like a horse.

ok sorry i have something to say about nope. i have seen a lot of ppl talking ab oj avoiding eye contact w everybody 99% of the time & a lot of ppl have been reading this as his character being autism coded. which is great! as a Black autistic person i’m like fuck yeah! turn that shit up!

but there are layers here. oj’s Blackness plays an evident role. so many of the characters that he is actively Not Looking At are….. white. (i saw another user talking ab this and i’ll tag them if i can find their post again). there is a very real cultural significance of Black people not looking white people in the eye to avoid “causing problems” or literally being beat and/or murdered for it. this is central to the movie. oj is SMART. he is calculated and analytical, and he’s worked in the film business for a very long time. and this poses the question: in a movie about a spectacle, what does it mean to be invisible?

additionally, oj’s avoiding eye contact makes sense for his character even if he wasn’t autism-coded. if the whole point of the movie is that you are saved by not viewing the spectacle, it makes perfect sense that oj is avoiding everyone’s eyes. if you are saved by not seeing, what is it that would make you look? what would make you give up everything if you knew what you would lose?

there’s only one thing, of course. only one thing oj would give everything up for. and that’s his sister.

Really really like the fact that we never see the tmz guys face in nope. It really proves the point how inhumane the parapazzi act in their pursuit of the story and how they in that pursuit often seem to lack basic human decency and how in turn it makes them seem unhuman.

How as soon jean jacket dies all the media shows up to capitalize on the pain and tramua that em, oj and angel went through....

happy halloween to my favorite autistic queer horror trio!

emerald haywood, o.j. haywood, and angel torres in: nope (2022) dir. jordan peele

doodle

the lesbian and autistic sibling duo jordan peele gave us that we didn’t even know we needed<3

okay so i just got done with nope 2022 and i'm scrolling in the tag and i saw a post that said the director's last moments were spent betraying the group and i do not at all agree with it.

running up the hill with the second camera was not a betrayal --- he was giving them the ultimate sacrifice for the ultimate shot. like, he was very aware that everything non-organic was spat back out, from the wheelchair to the keys to the coins, he verbally acknowledged it in a film where dialogue means a lot, so it would make sense to him that the camera would be spat out for oj, angel, and em to find after. he knew that he would not artistically top filming a wholeass ufo and also knew that, by getting these shots, he would never be left alone again. dude hates his fame, given his line about it being a nightmare he never wakes up from, so he decides to die doing what he loves: filming the best shot of this beast ever.

he brought along the handheld camera (one he explicitly custom built in order to get this shot, he brought an entirely different camera for this shot) and ran away from angel and the rest of the film they'd already captured. he wants them to have The shots, the ones we even get to see in the movie during his death. he knew that they would never approve of this, so he just didn't tell them all that he was going to go out doing this. the only reason angel was attacked was because he followed the director up to the ledge and then stared jean jacket down even when he was old not to.

all in all, i think that this funky lil johnny cash dude was just trying to get the oprah shot of all oprah shots and that he wanted to die doing that.

Another Nope (2022) Thought

What does it mean to be consumed? I am thinking of the moment after Jupe and the tourists are swept into the maw of Jean Jacket. When they are screaming, confused, trapped. As Jean Jacket hovers over the Haywood house, someone shouts and begs to be let out. Of what? Do they know that they are in Jean Jacket, the beast? That they are being digested? When Jean Jacket silences them, do they understand finally? There is something so horrifying, so visceral, about being in the maws of something and not even knowing it. Having your fate known by everyone but you.

And then I am thinking of the Haywood ranch. Of OJ and the horses, him slowly selling them away to Jupe, and thinking he can just buy them back. But the horses are already gone; Jean Jacket eats every single one of them. Jupe knows this, but lets OJ make his plan. He doesn’t tell OJ that his ranch is half-eaten, bleeding out in front of him. That he and Jean Jacket have been chewing on the Haywoods the whole time.

I am thinking about that horror, of being someone else’s meal, profit, plan, and of not knowing.

Nope (2022) dir. Jordan Peele

i wasn’t bothered enough to colour this properly so its looks like a mess rn, but you get the idea

its about being SEEN, man. the horrifying ordeal of being KNOWN, okay? em and oj see each other, they know each other. the reward of being loved, they get out alive BECAUSE of it, while working within a narrative that encourages you to think twice before looking (before seeing), a narrative that spends two hours reminding you of the weight your gaze holds, the power you wield. they have been subjected to the horrors of knowing, of seeing. they know the weight, the power, the consequences, they KNOW.

and they look at each other, and make sure the other looks back, make sure the other knows they are seen. because there is WEIGHT, there is KNOWING. they wield their gaze at each other with every bit of understanding, with the reminder of their power hovering above their heads ready to punish them for it. they SEE each other!! they fucking LOVE each other!!! god!!!

NOPE spoilers below

My favourite thing about Nope is how Jordan Peele presented behaviour created by trauma because you never really see it in horror movies beside a mention and maybe a little cry.

So to see Jupe so affected by the Gordy incident that it affected his behaviour with Jean-Jacket was fuckin fascinating. Like the whole reason he kept feeding JJ was because in his head, he related Gordy reaching out to fist bump him to their "bond".

He tried to establish a bond with Jean-Jacket via feeding, basically Learning Theory of Attachment, but this was due to his misunderstanding of why Gordy didn't attack Jupe in the first place. Because the table cloth stopped him from having direct eye contact with him.

And this misunderstanding created his one-sided bond with Jean Jacket.

fave horror trio studies